Sunday, November 16, 2014

It’s been 6 ½ years since I started this blog. Six years and
six months, over 300 posts. Several hair styles, dozens of tubes of pigment, a handful of brushes and at least a
million words, some of which even made it to the final posting.

As memory serves, the origins of my writing were begun as a response to an Alyson Stanfield coaching directive: An artist must have a blog. And so I did. How’s that for an inspired beginning?

This weekend a lovely afternoon was spent sifting through the thoughts and fears I’ve shared during my foray into this artist’s life. My ramblings and your kind responses were like leafing through my high school annual. Oh, the way we were!

I find I’m a fair writer, and a middling thinker; not so smart that you can’t follow
along, not insipid as to cause you to look away and never come back. You’re
reading this after all, aren’t you?

But has it helped me in my studio? After all, that was the point of my leaving the comfort of a steady paycheck. How does sifting ideas from
piles of disengaged thoughts make it easier to use paint? What do words
collected in cob-webby spaces have to do with images squeezed from paint tubes?
Has writing to you made it easier to be me?

This practice has allowed me to take all of the study, the
painting, the exhibiting, reading, practicing, success, failure, triumph and
dismal disappointment, one week at a time. It’s been easier – not easy, but
easier – to identify the frustrations and ironies and hilarities and loneliness
and grand celebrations of a creative life by separating myself from them with a
certain detached observation for the benefit of the blog. Reading through them
now allows an older, more certain me to reconnect more sweetly with those
realities.

Who’d a thunk? I’m not writing for you, I’m writing for me.

To prove I can. To show I don’t have to. For the challenge.
For the pleasure. For clarity. To reveal – or to veil - a truth.